


The Dancing Knight

by Miss_M



Category: 12 Dancing Princesses (Fairy Tale), A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Der Räuberbräutigam | The Robber Bridegroom (Fairy Tale), Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Dark Fairy Tale, F/M, Gen, Necrophilia, Sibling Incest, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-28
Updated: 2013-08-28
Packaged: 2017-12-24 22:29:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/945390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fusion between ASOIAF and two fairytales from the Brothers Grimm, “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” and “The Robber Bridegroom” </p><p>Brienne of Tarth is a penniless knight who accepts the challenge posed by Lord Tywin Lannister: to watch over his son and heir Jaime Lannister for three nights and discover what strange affliction is driving the greatest knight in the realm into an early grave. Brienne discovers a hidden world of dark and sensual magic, receives help from an unexpected source, and learns to rely on her wits as well as her sword. Also, dancing happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dancing Knight

**Author's Note:**

> This fusion idea came to me while I was toying with the way the canon relationship between Jaime and Brienne inverts, subverts and otherwise ‘verts gender roles, and thinking about which fairytales I could twist to that purpose. In addition to the two tales by the Divine Grimms, the bird in this owes its existence to “Cinderella” and to “The White Road,” Neil Gaiman’s variation on the robber bridegroom motif. Casterly Rock becomes simply the Rock here in order to make the location less ASOIAF-specific, more fairytale-general. The eagle-eyed might spot a phrase borrowed from John Crowley’s _Little, Big_. Although the kaleidoscope was not invented until the early 19th century, I liked the image in which it is referenced so much I decided to keep it, anachronism be damned. Likewise, I made Brienne a knight to see what would happen if society were marginally open to the possibility of women’s knighthood, and also because she bloody well deserves it. :-) Totally AU. I own nothing.

Tywin Lannister, Lord of the Rock, Warden of the West, the richest man in the realm, was not an easy man to impress. Even so, he was singularly unimpressed by the latest knight who came to try and win the handsome reward promised to anyone who solved the mystery behind his only son’s plight. 

For one thing, this knight came from a house known primarily for the beauty of its demesne, a small island on the other side of the world. For another, this knight was a woman. Several men from houses of glorious repute had already failed, and paid the price of failing Tywin Lannister. He was willing to concede that this Brienne of Tarth looked strong and capable, and had certainly earned her knighthood. Still, past experience boded ill for the girl. 

“You understand my terms,” he said, fingers steepled before him, looking down at the tall knight from his raised seat, a chair fit for a king. He wanted her to see the hands with which he had broken rebellious houses, killed his third, malformed child many years earlier, signed the death warrants of those who preceded her in this venture. Wanted her to know all the songs about him were true. She looked like the sort to listen to songs. 

The ugly girl nodded, her freckled cheeks flushing slightly. “I do, my lord,” she said, almost shyly. 

“Three nights, no more,” Tywin continued as though she had not spoken. “If you find what ails my son and bring me proof of its destruction, you will receive more gold than Tarth’s coffers have ever held.” He noticed the girl bristle at that, would not pay her the courtesy of acknowledging her discomfort. He spoke the plain truth. “If you do not, your head will adorn the walls of the Rock.”

“Yes, my lord,” she said after several moments’ silence indicated some response was expected. 

The Lord of the Rock leaned forward a bit, still forcing Brienne of Tarth to look up at him on his dais. “You are a knight, but that does not entitle you to spread tales about my house in every tavern and hall from here to the Wall. Understand that. You chose to come here, to take on this challenge. You were not compelled. The punishment matches the reward.” 

Not certain how to respond, Brienne of Tarth gave a curt nod, and was dismissed with a wave of Lord Lannister’s hand, his lion-sigil ring catching the sunlight. 

As she walked slowly down the long, empty hall away from the dais, the weight of Tywin Lannister’s hooded, appraising gaze on her shoulders and straight back, she reflected that the head of House Lannister might deserve his reputation as a ruthless, cunning opponent, but he had a weakness. He was an old man, despite the sharpness of his claws. His wife and daughter were dead. He had as good as told her that the survival of his house – of his only son and heir – was in her hands. 

It had been years since Brienne of Tarth was capable of believing someone like Tywin Lannister could be motivated primarily by love. She did not earn her knighthood without some loss of innocence, but she bore her honor as she bore her armor. Her father needed the Lannisters’ gold, true, but his daughter wanted ( _needed_ ) the honor, maybe even the glory of breaking the strange affliction which was driving Ser Jaime Lannister into an early grave. 

Rumors ran the length and breadth of the realm like torrents in Spring. Jaime Lannister, once the first knight in the land, was wasting away with an unknown sickness. The golden lion of the realm, once the model for every green squire and seasoned knight, every girl’s secret desire, had grown wan and listless. He rose from his bed more tired than he lay in it at night. The soles of his boots were found worn through every morning. It did not pass unnoticed that his enfeeblement began not long after his twin sister died in her birthing bed alongside her first babe. Her husband had insisted she should rest with his family, but his voice was drowned out by the chink of her father’s money. Cersei Lannister lay in the crypt below the Rock alongside her mother, cold as she had once been beautiful, cold as all the Lannisters’ gold, and her brother seemed set to join her before too long. Some whispered that House Lannister was cursed, drank secret toasts to its imminent downfall.

Brienne could not help feeling for Tywin Lannister as she prepared to enter his son’s chamber that evening. It could not have been easy for so proud a man to announce to all and sundry that his son was dying and he, the Lion of the Rock, was rendered so powerless as to open his doors to any hedge knight foolhardy or greedy enough to risk his neck on so odd a challenge. 

Brienne checked that her sword was on her hip and her shield within easy reach on her back. Checked her armor. Knew that she was stalling, rubbed her hands together, rapped sharply on Jaime Lannister’s door. 

A servant admitted her and scurried out, closing the door behind him before Brienne could so much as look around her. The chamber, like most of the Rock, was decorated in an eye-watering combination of crimson and gold, all heavy draperies and massive furniture, a testament to House Lannister’s wealth and lack of subtlety. 

Jaime Lannister sat on his four-poster bed, eyeing her with wry amusement. In his white shirt and linen britches, he looked like a pearl set in a red velvet cushion. A pearl with golden hair and eyes that went right through Brienne where she stood just inside the door, unsure if she should bow or not. She was there to save his life, after all, could not decide if the situation called for the usual courtesies. 

The younger Lannister resolved the matter for her. “So-o-o,” he drawled. “You are the latest candidate for my father’s severed-head collection. What should I call you, then?”

Brienne had long experience with schooling her features in a neutral expression. “I am Brienne of Tarth, my lord.” 

He grinned as though he found her name and home demesne vastly amusing. Brienne noticed for the first time the signs of his affliction in the pallor of his skin, the dark bags under his green eyes. Felt a stab of anger that sickness and exhaustion did so little to mar his beauty or diminish his easy arrogance.

“I mean, should I call you ‘Ser’ or ‘Lady’? Or perhaps you prefer another name.” He looked her up and down with slow insolence. “I could think of a couple.”

Brienne stiffened, straightened, was rewarded by the slightest widening of his eyes when he took in her full height. “I am a knight, _Ser_ , as are you. I am here at your father’s behest, not for you to jest with.” She marched to an empty chair from which she could keep an eye on the bed, refusing to look him in the eye. 

He tried to bait her a bit longer, but she refused to respond. Men had made sport of her all her life, and some of them could have given Jaime Lannister a few suggestions. Since her knighting ceremony, Brienne found that comments about her face and height and the contents of her smallclothes had lost some of their sting. She need only remind herself that she was a knight, peer to every other knight in the realm, and a better fighter than many. What price men’s japes then?

The chair was upholstered in that shade of red which reminded Brienne of freshly spilled blood. She settled on it as well as she could in her armor. The servant who had let her in brought her a cup of wine. Brienne was startled to see that Ser Jaime would not have any, wondered who had thought to have it sent to her. She explained that she did not drink wine, knew that she was blushing as the two men eyed her, one sardonically, the other in frank astonishment. Refused to look up or show any discomfort while the servant helped Ser Jaime undress for bed right in front of her, though she did notice that he had to lean on the servant’s arm more than once before he was abed, the candles were snuffed out, and she was left alone with him at last. Sooner than Brienne thought possible, he was snoring loudly, so loudly she half suspected him of feigning it to irritate her. 

Brienne tried to sit more easily on her chair, but it was made for show rather than ease. Her armor clinked when she shifted on it. She tried to sit very still, but it made her tense. Once her eyes adjusted to the dark, she slowly took in the whole chamber. Apart from the spacious bed and the chair, there was a chest long enough to contain either clothes or swords, and a large stone fireplace. No fire burned in it on this balmy night. Sparse furnishings, as befitted a knight, even if everything was positively smothered in the colors of blood and gold. 

Brienne considered inspecting the contents of the chamber for hidden threats, but realized that she would surely wake Ser Jaime if she started moving about in full armor. In the morning, she decided, and settled down to her vigil. 

This was different than keeping watch on the road or in camp. The sounds were both fewer and different. Instead of the rustle of leaves and scurrying animals, of grazing horses and pissing, rutting, eating, singing humans, there was only the sigh of skin on sheets as Jaime Lannister shifted, stopped snoring, deep in sleep at last. The wind sounded different as well so high up in a tower with the sea a dull throb far below. Brienne found it difficult to judge the passage of time with no moon out and the stars limited to what she could see through the window by the bed, half obscured by crimson drapery. 

She sighed, silently cursed the Lannisters’ love of opulence. She should have brought her traveling blanket, would have sat on it against the wall far better than in the godsforsaken chair. 

Time crawled past Brienne, and nothing happened. 

Nothing happened. 

Nothing. 

She could never be certain later whether she had dozed off or not. It had never happened to her while she kept watch before. She misliked the idea that fatigue had crept up on her now, when so much hung in the balance, and Jaime Lannister needed no new reasons to jest with her. 

She was certain she heard a bird trill, as incongruous in the depth of night as a bird singing under the sea. She blinked and saw Jaime Lannister, dressed in red from throat to toe, enter the fireplace, which was bathed in a milky light coming from its depths. 

Brienne sat on her chair, staring at the now empty fireplace with her mouth hanging open. She cut her eyes to the bed, found it empty. When she looked back at the fireplace, the white light was fading, stone and soot regaining their usual shape on the hearth.

She did not stop to think. She lurched up with a wild rattle of armor, practically ran into the fireplace, from which the light was rapidly dwindling. 

The chimney hole at the back of the fireplace was tall enough for Jaime Lannister, but Brienne had to duck a bit. She was only a little surprised to find the chimney opening out and in, becoming a short corridor followed by a long flight of stairs leading straight down, all of it lit by that same light. There were no candles or torches on the walls. The light seemed to come from the very stone of the passage, seemed to envelop Brienne, fill her eyes, her nose and throat, but did not allow her to see how far ahead of her Jaime Lannister was. Or even if he was on the same staircase. 

She counted the stairs as she went down, hoping the sound of her descent would not give her away. 

Brienne had no experience of magic. To her certain knowledge, a fireplace was a silly place in which to hide an actual secret passage, since in a siege or any other emergency fire was likely to be an enemy. Nor did she console herself that her wits would get her through this. The idea that some unknown magic had gotten the better of all those knights who had preceded her was also cold comfort. Brienne squeezed the hilt of her sword instead, counted well past any number of stairs which could lead to the great hall or the kitchens or even the dungeons. Or a secret landing place in a sea cave. 

She wondered briefly if she was still on the Rock or under it or in some demesne under the sea, when the stairs came to an end and she was faced by a pair of massive doors which glimmered like beaten silver in the eerie light. They stood open and unguarded.

She walked through the silver doors, and into a great hall which put Tywin Lannister’s seat of power to shame. 

She thought of the elder Lannister because whoever was master of this hall had similar ideas about furnishings. Everywhere Brienne looked, she saw white, crystal, silver, all catching that pale, enveloping light and giving it back as a shimmer which hid all other colors in it. Tall columns carved of moonstone supported a roof so high Harren the Black may have envied it. Between the columns and the distant walls, a dance went on. Lords and ladies twirled together with stately decorum, their clothes pale, their faces beautiful and severe as ice masks, their hair flax or corn silk or even the straw color of Brienne’s own hair. 

The color of her hair was the only thing she had in common with these figures. She imagined they must all be tittering at her as she stood there, a woman wearing armor and weapons instead of white silk, a maiden broad and heavy as a man. Yet nobody seemed to pay her any mind, so absorbed were they in their dance and the music which guided it. Brienne noticed that, unlike at any feast she had ever attended, there was no food or drink in evidence, and the musicians were nowhere to be seen. 

As though responding to her silent query as to its origin, the music changed subtly, the slightest shift which went through Brienne like a shiver of early frost. The tune became less stately, more sinuous, impassioned. The dancers shifted to accommodate it, match it, outdo it. Their movements took on a hint of lewdness, of wantonness. The smiles which flashed past Brienne became vaguely obscene, like the smiles of skulls which time or dogs had stripped of all flesh. 

Brienne shook her head to clear it, feeling as though a thick, viscous liquid were rising up her legs, threatening to submerge her, and looked around wildly for Jaime Lannister. 

She did not have to search long, for in his festive garb of Lannister red he stood out even more sharply than Brienne did. She saw him through the gaps between the dancers’ entwined, swirling bodies, as far from her as though they were separated by a field of battle. 

He danced with the same kind of sharp grace Brienne imagined he must display with sword in hand. His partner matched him step for step, sway for sway, their four pale hands meeting and parting like long grasses in a breeze. His partner was nearly as tall as Ser Jaime, with golden hair and a dress so white it hurt Brienne’s eyes to look at it, sunlight on fresh snow. The woman carried the milky light around her like a cold halo. 

Brienne did not need to fight through the dancers for a closer look, did not need to see the woman’s face, her smile or her eyes, to know her. She had never seen Cersei Lannister in life, but Brienne recognized her. The Lannister woman danced as Brienne never had, never could, her brother’s hands meeting and parting on her hands, her waist, her back in a way no brother’s hands should. He was intent on his sister’s smile, but even so Brienne saw the light catch in the drops of sweat on his brow, sink into the darkness around his eyes. Saw the tremor in his hands, and how they reached for his beautiful sister as though the touch of her flesh could lend him strength. 

A silver cup appeared in Cersei Lannister’s hand, was lifted to her brother’s lips. They stood, the still center of the whirling mass of dancers, as he gazed at her and drank. The lioness smiled with something akin to triumph and let the empty cup drop, lifted her chin, twined her fingers in her brother’s hair. Was bringing him closer to her lips, crimson as wine, as blood, when Brienne saw the light shift on her white sleeve, on her pale flesh, and reveal the long bones of her arm, the rotted chunks of meat still clinging to Cersei Lannister’s wrist, to the fingers with which she gripped Jaime’s hair.

Brienne let out a breath so loud she could hear it over the lilting music. 

Louder still, a bird trilled. 

Only Brienne seemed to hear it, or perhaps she was the only one to understand the words the bird sang out again and again. Words which looped around her like the music, like the dance, but more insistent, grating, fingernails on glass. 

“Clever by day,” the bird sang in a voice like a crying woman’s, “clever by night, maiden knight, you may have a sword, you don’t have this night.”

Brienne looked up and saw the songbird perched high above her on a moonstone pillar. Its plumage was bright yellow, its eyes sad as no bird’s eyes should ever be. It sang to Brienne, but she misliked its song. She was a knight. She could not leave a man whose life she should protect to be devoured by the dead creature which looked like his sister. 

She tore her gaze from the bird, looked for the Lannister twins. Found them wrapped around each other like ivy around an oak tree, far from her in a forest of pale dancers. 

Brienne considered pulling out her sword and hacking a way through the dancing throng as through so many creepers, to where the brother and sister stood, swaying to the music as one. The bird still sang to her, and she alone could hear. 

Hating herself for a coward and oathbreaker, Brienne turned around and passed back through the double doors wrought of silver. She took the stairs two at a time, arrived in Jaime Lannister’s bedchamber sweaty, out of breath, to find the bed still empty, dawn in the window and common songbirds waking up outside. Their songs carried no messages for her. She collapsed on her uncomfortable chair and let exhaustion claim her. 

The same servant who had brought her wine the previous night woke her some hours later, the midmorning sun streaming through the window, the bed made, Jaime Lannister still absent. Panic stabbed through Brienne at the thought that he may not have returned from the white hall beneath the Rock, before she saw the boots clutched in the servant’s hand, their soles worn thin as old parchment. 

She found Ser Jaime in the solar, looking like a man who had danced and kissed his dead sister all the livelong night. There were more shadows around his eyes and in the corner of his smile, its cruel edge blunted. 

“Ah, _Ser_ Brienne,” he called when he saw her. “I trust you are well rested. You were snoring happily enough this morning.”

Brienne came to stand by the chair in which the young lion reclined, noting again the lack of courtesy in his posture as well as the tremor in the hand which held a cup half full of red wine, how heavily his eyelids hung, how drained of life he seemed. He looked like a rake and an invalid, not like the man who had won more duels, jousts and melees than any other knight in a hundred years. He looked like a man with no will left for anything but wine and a woman’s lips. 

“You are dying, Ser,” she said simply. “Your sister is taking you to her grave with her. Every night you spend dancing with her brings you closer to it.”

She hated herself for the way her voice wavered on the word _dancing_. She wondered about the wine the servant had brought her and all the other knights before her, about the babe whose birth took Cersei Lannister’s life, about what it might have been like for her, Brienne, had her own brother not drowned so young. So young. She looked at Jaime Lannister and saw the golden youth he had been not too long ago lurking just below the dissipated death’s mask his face was becoming. It was that youth who gave Ser Jaime the strength to slam down his cup, spilling wine down his hand, and lurch up, forcing Brienne to back up a step. He fisted his hand in her jerkin, brought his face close to hers, close enough to kiss or bite. 

“Do not speak of my sister,” he said with the tremor of mountains shifting in his voice. “Do not even think her name. Go back to your little island of sheepfuckers, Brienne of Tarth, and do not speak of things you know nothing about and cannot understand.”

 _Hear me roar_ , Brienne thought. Only a sound to frighten mice. The lion was losing his strength, soon the crows would pick over his ribs and eyes. 

“Your lord father has given me three nights,” she said, more calmly than she felt. “I promised him I would discover what ails you and destroy it. I have discovered it. You may try to prevent me from destroying it. You may _try_.”

She stepped back and he let her, his fist leaving her breastbone feeling oddly light, hollow as a bird bone. She bowed and left him trembling on his feet in the solar. 

When evening came, Brienne reluctantly conceded that Jaime Lannister was not quite the child he could appear to be when she found he had not locked his chamber door against her or posted guards to keep her away. He was, however, already abed when she entered, curled up like a hedgehog with his back to the crimson chair, to all appearances asleep since suppertime. She permitted herself an eye-roll before she settled down for the second night. 

The bird did not let her down, its trill cutting through the lightest veil of sleep which had settled over Brienne. Again she saw Ser Jaime duck into the fireplace as though unaware or uncaring of her presence. Again she followed, more calmly this time, intent only to watch and learn. 

The double doors to the great hall full of dancers were made of polished gold. The dancers spun and writhed as before, dressed in cloth of gold with gold nets in their pallid hair. The pillars which held up the roof were carved from yellow sunstone. It looked more like the Lannisters’ great hall this way, but the music, the dance, the way Brienne stood out yet escaped notice remained the same. 

Cersei Lannister wore a gown like a muted sun, her spun-gold hair a-glitter against it. Brienne watched for and caught several glimpses of her true nature, the flash of a fleshless ankle as her brother twirled her, the dullness of exposed bone on her exquisite shoulder, how her hair seemed matted with earth in the shadow of an elegantly raised arm. Her brother noticed nothing, as intently as he watched her, while his breath came labored and his hand trembled on her waist. Brienne imagined this must be how the first man in the world had looked at the first woman: like she was both the most startling and the most obvious creature in the world. 

The cup Cersei produced was made of gold, but her brother did not drink from it and take her in his arms. He drank, and drank, until the cup slipped from his fingers and he swooned. Cersei caught him, held his weight effortlessly, as though he were a rag doll, no more. She looked straight at Brienne across the battlefield of swaying dancers between them. Grinned with a skull’s teeth, too long, teeth like hungry wood. Her lovely face ( _her brother’s face_ ) made hideous. 

Brienne heard the bird start up its trill, but she did not pause to listen. She was already unstrapping her shield and taking a step into the crowd of dancers, her hand falling onto her sword hilt as naturally as a leaf falls, as a bird soars. 

“Careful, careful, maid of Evenfall,” the bird sang, “you will not win, your head will roll.” 

A dancing couple slammed into Brienne with unexpected force, sent her stumbling. Another two pairs of hands wrenched away her shield, still other hands fumbled for her sword. Fingers cold as the flesh of drowned men, as her brother’s hand had been cold when they dragged him out of the sea so many years ago. 

Brienne hit a dancer’s leering, pale face with her elbow, stood and brought her gauntleted fist to crash into his partner’s chest with a sound like sodden wood breaking, drew her sword and looked for the red of Jaime’s clothes in the heaving sea of gold. He was miles away from her, clutched in his sister’s arms, her smile triumphant yet oddly sedate. Not quite a smile of jubilation. The slow, certain smile of imminent victory. 

It was that smile which helped Brienne decide even more than the bird’s insistent plea did. She hacked a way back to the great double doors, blood spurting real enough from those she maimed, though their wounds smelled rotten, their faces and hands affording Brienne more glimpses of what the dead looked like when they dressed up like the living and tried to dance themselves into a semblance of life. Once through the doors, she ran up the stairs, pacing herself, calm in the absence of a pursuit, knowing as surely as she knew her own name that the dead could not follow her. She emerged in Ser Jaime’s chamber just as dawn silvered his windowsill and the first bird reported for duty. 

The loss of her shield bothered her like an itching wound, though not so much that she could not think and plan as she paced up and down the corridor in front of Jaime’s chamber. Her armor weighed her down and her sword arm hurt. She told herself her unwillingness to sleep had nothing to do with the uncertainty whether Jaime would ( _could_ ) return. When the servant appeared to wake his master and came back out a moment later, pale as milk and telling Brienne he could not wake Ser Jaime, she felt a rush of guilt and relief, and went off in search of a bed on which she could collapse for a few hours. 

Tywin Lannister sent for her before she had had nearly enough sleep. He sat in the same position as when she had met him, but Brienne saw the telltale tightness around his eyes, the pale lines of anger etched in the corners of his thin lips. 

“My son does not wake,” he said, steepled fingers motionless as marble. “The maester says he may never wake.” His eyes bore into Brienne with the force of a battering ram. She waited impassively. Men like Tywin Lannister could never resist making solemn pronouncements. “A lion does not die like a sheep,” the Lord of the Rock said at last, his final judgment. 

Brienne took a deep breath, reminded herself not to stammer or grip her sword hilt. “My lord, Ser Jaime lives still and I have one more night.” She did not dare say more, suspected this was enough or no words were. 

Lord Tywin watched her unblinking, more snake than lion, till she felt sweat prickle in her armpits, between her shoulder blades, the traitorous blood spreading in a slow, inexorable tide up her neck, across her face. He nodded sharply, once, said nothing while Brienne bowed and walked away as slowly as she could.

She did not procure another shield, suspecting it would not bring her good fortune to bear Lannister arms, laying faith in what wits, armor and weapon she already had. The double doors which greeted her descent among the dead on the third night were covered in sparkling crystals, maybe diamonds. Brienne could never judge such things. The hall was so bright Brienne had to squint. The milky, distracting light of Cersei Lannister’s magic reflected off the polished surfaces of spun-glass pillars, court dress covered in faceted stones, eyes as hard as diamonds. 

Cersei Lannister herself looked encased in a jewel, bore it like a carapace. Or a suit of armor. It inhibited her graceful, carnal movements not a whit, but her brother could not match her as he had done before. He had not woken once during the day or when Brienne entered his chamber that evening, but there he was, stumbling in Cersei’s trailing arms, missing his cues, his face so white above his red clothes Brienne’s heart ached to see it. She had no more time to watch and wait. She looked up, searched for the yellow bird among the tops of the glittering columns. 

It looked back at her from above, compassion and sorrow in its bright eyes, not at all as Tywin Lannister had looked at Brienne from his dais. The memory of his calculating gaze nudged something loose in Brienne. 

As though responding to her thought, the bird trilled: “Be brave, be brave, maiden fair, or my son and you will stay in this grave.” 

_I am not fair_ , Brienne thought grimly as she unsheathed her sword, _and he_ wants _to stay here_. 

Then she stepped in among the dancers, trying as best she could to sway alongside them, keeping her naked sword down by her leg, still yet ready. 

She bumped into dancers, or they careened into her, just a little too sharply for accident. Brienne ducked her head, hunched her shoulders, gripped her sword more tightly and swayed on, trying to move her broad shoulders like a man, to shift her waist and hips as a woman would. 

Cold hands, too many to belong to just one pair of dancers, scrabbled at her arm, caught in her sleeve like rats’ claws, grabbed her sword, heedless of its sharp blade. She was almost in the center of the hall, just a few pairs of dancers separating her from the twins, one shining upright, the other limp as a severed limb. A goblet carved from a single clear crystal shone in Cersei’s skeletal hand, inclined toward Jaime’s slack lips. 

Brienne lost her sword, let it go to shake off the dancers hanging on her arm. More hands grabbed at her armor as she pushed forward, tore it off in chunks, cutting into her flesh and ripping the shirt and britches she wore underneath. Fingers too strong for life dug into her arms and legs. Blood dripped down her thigh, between the fingers of her left hand. 

She gathered up all the strength she had, the strength which men had mocked and women sneered at, with which she had knocked more knights than she cared to remember into the dust, and hurled herself the last few paces, out of the throng of dancers and into the twins. 

All three went down in a tangle of limbs, cold, sticky with blood, nearly lifeless. Brienne had her injured hand in Cersei’s matted, seaweed hair, holding her off, her knee propped up on the floor between the twins. Jaime’s eyes were closed. He seemed dead but for the thin breath which still passed his parted lips. Cersei’s face was a twisted mask of thwarted rage, her features shifting like maggots under the skin, from living beauty to buried horror and back again. She had dropped the crystal cup when she fell, its red contents spilling over her dress, over Brienne’s wounded skin, invisible on Jaime’s jerkin. 

With a grimace of pain, Brienne tensed her injured arm, trying to keep out of the dead woman’s grasp, used her other hand to shake Jaime’s shoulder, slap his face. The dancers had set up an ululating cry but seemed unable or reluctant to help their mistress. Brienne could not hear her own voice calling Jaime’s name over their noise, could not hear if the bird had any helpful advice. 

The light glinting on the lip of the crystal cup caught her eye. Desperately she let go of Cersei’s hair, grabbed up the vessel while the dead woman attacked her with nails and tiny fists, hissing like a wet cat, fighting as a woman does. Brienne ignored the cloying scents of perfume on rotting flesh which coated the roof of her mouth, the sharp pain of Cersei’s claws on her exposed skin, focused on the motionless Jaime, on the vessel in her blood-soaked hand. Jaime’s own hand, whole and strong and perfect, lay on the floor inches away from Brienne’s face, weighed down as she was by Cersei. 

His sword hand. _His life in his hand_. Brienne could feel hysteria bubbling up inside her, knew that if she hesitated or laughed they were both lost. She smashed the crystal cup against the floor, used the jagged remnant to slash and saw at Jaime’s hand, wrist, arm, while she screamed at him to open his eyes and Cersei let forth a pitched battle-wail right next to her ear. Brienne felt the pain send shivers through Jaime, felt a corresponding shiver seize his sister, force her to abandon her assault on Brienne. 

Jaime’s eyes opened, murky green waters off the Rock, focused on her as from a long way away. “Brienne,” he breathed. 

She must have bucked Cersei off, lifted Jaime, somehow made it through the tangle of dancers, undone perhaps by their mistress’s distress, somehow carried Jaime up those interminable stairs, bumping against stone and leaving a trail of blood drops in her wake. Must have. 

She could find no other explanation for how Jaime’s servant found them in his master’s chamber, Jaime barely conscious, his right hand a mangled mess of bone and sinew, Brienne cradling him, dressed in little more than her smallclothes and the remnants of a bloody shirt, her neck and shoulder scored by angry claw marks. 

She could not very well tell Tywin Lannister that his dead wife watched over her last surviving child in the guise of a golden songbird, and may have carried them up out of the grave and into the rosy light of dawn. Not and keep her head on her shoulders, when Tywin’s heir was maimed beyond repair while in Brienne’s care, and the tale she had to tell was wild indeed, her only proof a few long, blond hairs on her clothes and the shard of a broken crystal cup still clutched in her hand. 

In the course of that endless day, her fourth spent at the Rock, Tywin made her tell her tale again and again, musing out loud about taking one of her hands as payment for his son’s injury. Brienne had just enough presence of mind not to respond to his baiting, to repeat all the details as many times as the Lord of the Rock wanted to hear, and to resolutely _not_ ask after Ser Jaime. While tremors coursed through her where she stood before Tywin’s dais and her wounds complained mutely, she wondered if her own mother had ever watched over her in a bird’s feathered skin, but Brienne had been too dull to understand her song. Dismissed back to the chamber where she had rested the day before, now with two Lannister men guarding the door, Brienne thought a quiet, lonely cell may have been preferable. Then she remembered what lay under the cells and cellars and sea caves of the Rock, and hoped with her last sliver of wakefulness that Tywin Lannister was cautious and cunning enough to have the fireplace in Jaime’s chamber bricked up. 

In the end, Lord Tywin took neither Brienne’s head nor her hand. He did not even pull out her tongue to prevent her spreading tales, did have his castellan provide her with a new set of clothes, plain armor, sword, and an unmarked shield. She did not quite count herself lucky, did regret that she could send her father no much-needed gold, but she knew better than to say so. 

The chatty maester who tended her wounds before she left the Rock told her, in secrecy and on her honor, that Ser Jaime was awake and healing well, though his hand would likely remain useless for a long time to come, and had celebrated his miraculous recovery by having a blazing row with his father. The outcome was that Jaime was leaving his father’s house for an indefinite period, and would travel to the royal capital for its sedate pace of life and warm, healing air. 

Brienne held back the snort of amusement which wanted out, remembering the fetid, plague-ridden warrens and alleys of King’s Landing, and the profusion of tourneys which took place there. It would clearly take more than a wounded paw to make a lion change his ways, though perhaps this willful separation from his father’s hall and his sister’s grave was a hopeful sign. 

Two moons later, Brienne rode into King’s Landing on the eve of a tourney in honor of a Riverlands lord’s third marriage, one hundred gold dragons promised as the main prize. Brienne’s horse was spavined, she could only afford the cheapest kind of respectable inn, and Tarth’s hastily painted colors had nearly washed off her shield after what was proving an uncommonly wet Summer. She needed to win that tourney, and she needed a good night’s rest beforehand. Instead she called for pen and ink, and a boy who would take a message to a knight hosted at the Red Keep for a copper. Then she sat alone and bone-tired, barely touching her modest meal, and cursed herself for a very great fool. 

The knock on her door not an hour later set her heart lurching and her hands a-tremble. Jaime Lannister looked markedly better than the last time Brienne had seen him, sprawled barely alive and bleeding across her lap in his chamber at the Rock, the last of the night gathered around his closed eyes. Now, hardly any trace of his affliction remained on his handsome face or in his easy smile, and Brienne cursed herself again. 

“Ser Jaime,” she managed, her mouth dry as sand. 

He returned her bow, proving that he could, in fact, be courteous. “Lady Brienne. I received your note. As you see, my health is markedly improved.”

“I…” Brienne started, stopped, scowled. Her tendency to stammer had gotten better with time, but seemed to have set in again with a vengeance. “You could have sent back a note. You need not have troubled yourself to come all this way.”

“It was no trouble. I was planning on coming this way tonight. Some of the best brothels line this street, and I needed a distraction.”

He laughed at her deepening scowl and blush. So easy for him to laugh, who had never been the object of scorn. 

Who had left his father’s house and his dead sister’s arms to come to the capital like any other knight seeking his fortune. There were even rumors afoot that his father would adopt a biddable cousin to inherit the Rock. 

Brienne’s eyes slid to the bandaged hand Jaime held stiffly by his side. He followed her gaze, his smile turning softer, almost gentle. “It seems I owe you a debt,” he said with no hint of his usual bravado. 

Brienne started as though he had whipped her. “You owe me no debt, Ser. If it had not been for me, your hand…”

He cut her off without raising his voice, green flames dancing in his eyes as he watched Brienne intently across her threshold. “If it had not been for you, my hand and the rest of me would be in a place where no living thing should be. Well,” he did smile then, a crooked, mocking sliver of a smile, “no _sane_ living thing, at least.” 

Some of those shadows lingered around his eyes still, now that she looked more closely. It took a moment for Brienne to realize his mockery was not directed against her. 

“A Lannister pays his debts.” The words were out of her mouth before she could swallow them back, remind herself of who she was, who he was. 

Jaime’s face took on an alert look, a look which would have been plain startled in another man. Then he smiled yet another smile, this one gentle and teasing and wholly unfamiliar to Brienne. “A Lannister does. Perhaps you will allow me to start paying my debt to you with a cup of whatever swill passes for wine in this inn you choose to frequent.” 

Brienne took refuge from the confusion his kaleidoscopic smiles were causing in her belly by grumbling how she did not drink wine and could not afford a better inn, while she pulled the door to her tiny room closed behind her and walked side by side with Ser Jaime, downstairs to the common room. Tried not to think of the three nights she had followed him down a very different set of stairs. 

“Mead, then,” he said happily, waving his bandaged hand to attract the innkeeper’s attention. “Though it would be only fair if I did make you drink wine. Between me fighting with my left hand and you falling down drunk, we would give the other knights a fighting chance at those gold dragons.”

Brienne knew her mouth was open, could not be bothered to shut it before she spoke. “ _You_ are fighting in the tourney tomorrow?”

He placed his bandaged hand on his chest, rocked back in his seat as though she had punched him. “You wound me. A Lannister _always_ pays his debts, but sometimes wounded Lannisters far from the Rock must earn the means to do it. Which reminds me: where will you take yourself after tomorrow?”

When Brienne was younger and her father still hoped to marry her off, and dissuade her from a life of valor and adventure in pursuit of knighthood, her septa taught her to sip daintily out of her cup if a suitor ever asked her a question she did not know how to answer, to give her time to think. Jaime Lannister was not her suitor and this inn was not Evenfall Hall, but Brienne sensed his query carried far more weight than the light tone in which it was posed suggested. So she sipped her mead, feeling none the wiser, and returned a question of her own: “Why does my lord ask?”

“So formal! You cannot always be so formal if we are to travel together, seeking glory and gold dragons.”

“Together,” Brienne repeated, feeling a blush rise with the inevitability of tides. “We cannot travel together.”

“Why?”

“Because… Because it is impossible! A man and a woman…” 

He grinned at her, more wolf than lion just then. 

She closed her eyes, hated her blush, ground out: “People would see us, hear you call me Lady Brienne, and decide I am your… your…”

“Ye-e-es, my what?” he drawled with obvious pleasure, eyes dancing. 

“Your… your _slattern_ ,” she managed at last. 

He laughed so long and hard his wine and her mead sloshed onto the table, and other guests turned to peer at them. 

“This is not knightly,” Brienne said miserably, certain that her very toes were blushing. 

“You are right,” he conceded, laughter still edging his voice like shivery silk. “My apologies. I will call you Ser Brienne.” He paused to savor her scowl. “At least no one will mistake you for my squire. You are far too big and menacing for that. The world will see only two knights errant, maybe a little the worse for wear, always ready to slay a monster or rescue a fair maiden.” 

Brienne thought that in the songs she had loved as a child, the knight who rescued a maid from a monster usually won her hand in marriage as his reward. Whether it was also the maid’s reward or the maid’s unwanted burden, the songs never said. 

“Knights errant do not exist outside of songs and never travel in pairs,” she said, relaxing fractionally in her seat.

“Perhaps they should.” 

Brienne weighed this proposition like a gold coin of dubious purity, tossed it up at last, watched it with her mind’s eye as it caught and reflected the sunlight before landing. 

“Yes. Perhaps they should,” she said equably, with a small smile.


End file.
